Winter has been winter again. The way I remember her. Chillingly cold, clapping her blue hand over your mouth and stealing your breath, slipping ice fingers down your shirt and between the seams to make you shiver, biting the tip of your nose until it turns bright red. She sweeps her white skirts in drifts across the road and hangs dripping lace along the branches of the denuded trees, striping their trunks with snow. I love her when she shows a little wild.
Today I go out to meet her face to face. Head out on the roads to the village to pick up a booklet of stamps before the price goes up again, a quart of organic milk to make another batch of yogurt, and some fresh greens to toss to the chickens in their coop while they wait for spring.
She has transformed the world. Nothing is as we know it. She reinvents the earth, tosses the world about in her white dizzy, and through the thick and weighted clouds, a white sun breaks through from time to time with a pale and otherworldly glow.
Why do I love winter so? I can't say. Can one explain a mad rush in the blood? Maybe that wild streak in her, when she kicks up her heels like she does today. White veils sweep across the roads, and I drive into them with care, but with a rush, too. Winter challenges me, and I rise to the challenge.
Brrr
ReplyDeleteI would take a cold winter day over a hot summer day ... any day!
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